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Afghanistan : Vietnam as … ?

Posted by Christopher Allbritton on September 8, 2009 at 1:06 pm +0000 · 1 Comment 

A good friend of mine who asked to remain anony­mous, but who is very smart and wise on such things, quib­bled with my Viet­nam anal­ogy. With his kind per­mis­sion, it is reprinted below: A good post, though I have to offer one quib­ble: I hold that all com­par­isons of Afghanistan to Viet­nam are de facto false without […]

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Three U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan - Los Angeles Times

Posted by Google Inc. on August 11, 2009 at 11:25 pm +0000 · Leave a Comment 

FOXNew­sThree U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan­Los Ange­les Times­Re­port­ing from Kabul, Afghanistan — Tal­iban mil­i­tants killed three Amer­i­can troops in volatile south­ern Afghanistan, US mil­i­tary author­i­ties …‘Spe­cial Report’ Panel on Fight­ing T…

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Feared Taliban Leader Killed, But Military Strategy is Not the ... - Religion Dispatches

Posted by Google Inc. on August 10, 2009 at 9:32 pm +0000 · Leave a Comment 


Aljazeera.net
Feared Tal­iban Leader Killed, But Mil­i­tary Strat­egy is Not the …
Reli­gion Dis­patches
The ties to al Qaeda are thin, espe­cially among the Pak­istan Tal­iban. Most of the lead­ers are war­lords and oppor­tunists, and much of their sup­port comes …
Report: Pak­istan Nuclear Facil­i­ties Attacked at Least Three Times …FOXNews


Life, death and the Tal­iban: Blow­backReuters
US pres­sure on Pak­istan relentsDaily Times
The Hill -Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive Mag­a­zine -Reuters
all 65 news articles »

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Baitullah Mehsud May Be Dead

Posted by Christopher Allbritton on August 7, 2009 at 12:26 pm +0000 · 1 Comment 

ISLAM­ABAD — If con­firmed, this would be a huge vic­tory in the fight against tak­firi mil­i­tants in Pak­istan: U.S. and Pak­istani author­i­ties were inves­ti­gat­ing whether Pak­istani Tal­iban chief Bait­ul­lah Mehsud, who has led a vio­lent cam­paign of sui­cide attacks and assas­si­na­tions against Pakistan’s gov­ern­ment, was killed in a CIA mis­sile strike. A Pak­istani offi­cial said Fri­day that reports of […]

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Taking the Eyes Off the Ball

Posted by Christopher Allbritton on June 16, 2009 at 7:11 am +0000 · 1 Comment 

Both Nicholas Schmi­dle, author of “To Live or to Per­ish For­ever: Two Tumul­tuous Years in Pak­istan,” and Andrew Exum (Abu Muqawama, yo) are warn­ing that expand­ing the Pak­istan mil­i­tary oper­a­tion, cur­rently push­ing back the Tal­iban from the Swat Val­ley, to Waziris­tan right now is likely a big mis­take. Schmidle’s con­cerns are logis­ti­cal and prac­ti­cal: … it […]

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No Winners in Somalia

Posted by Christopher Allbritton on June 2, 2009 at 1:04 pm +0000 · 1 Comment 

Soma­lia has become the war that nobody can win, at least not right now. None of the fac­tions — the mod­er­ate Islamist gov­ern­ment, the rad­i­cal Shabab mil­i­tants, the Sufi cler­ics who con­trol some parts of cen­tral Soma­lia, the clan mili­tias who con­trol oth­ers, the autonomous gov­ern­ment of Soma­liland in the north­west and the semi­au­tonomous gov­ern­ment of […]

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Operation Rahi-i-Rast: One Month On

Posted by Christopher Allbritton on May 27, 2009 at 12:27 am +0000 · 2 Comments 

Yes­ter­day marked the one-month mark for the Pak­istani military’s offen­sive against the Tal­iban in the Swat region. How are things going? Let’s assess: This week­end saw the begin­ning of the bat­tle for Min­gora, the valley’s admin­is­tra­tive seat. The mil­i­tary is reported to be in con­trol of about half of the city, but some Tal­iban fighters […]

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Pakistan Claims 700 Taliban Dead? Yeah, right.

Posted by Christopher Allbritton on May 12, 2009 at 5:06 am +0000 · 2 Comments 

Color me skep­ti­cal, but Pak­istani Inte­rior Min­is­ter Rehman Malik is claim­ing Pakistan’s offen­sive in the NWFP has killed 700 Tal­iban fight­ers. “More than 700 mil­i­tants have been killed dur­ing the last four days. Fifty-two Tal­iban fight­ers were killed in Swat in the last 24 hours,” he said. He said the oper­a­tion would con­tinue till the last […]

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Light blogging today, News updates

Posted by Christopher Allbritton on May 6, 2009 at 10:32 am +0000 · Leave a Comment 

I’m on dead­line for a project today, so the blog­ging will be light. In the mean­time, don’t miss these sto­ries: Pak­istani Army Poised for New Push Into Swat — New York Times: PESHAWAR, Pak­istan — Res­i­dents flooded out of the Swat Val­ley by the thou­sands on Tues­day as the gov­ern­ment pre­pared to mount a new mil­i­tary cam­paign against […]

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Shooting Oneself in the Foot in Swat

Posted by Christopher Allbritton on May 5, 2009 at 8:29 am +0000 · Leave a Comment 

How not to con­duct an effec­tive counter-insurgency (COIN) cam­paign: ISLAM­ABAD — Thou­sands of pan­icked res­i­dents on foot and crammed in buses, vans and trucks fled Swat val­ley north of Pakistan’s cap­i­tal Tues­day fol­low­ing the break­down of a frag­ile truce between gov­ern­ment forces and the Tal­iban. Author­i­ties lifted a cur­few for a few hours to allow res­i­dents to evacuate […]

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